


brush off the clouds and cheer up (put on a happy face)

by jazzfic



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:20:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26805769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzfic/pseuds/jazzfic
Summary: When a series of bad moods descends upon the crew, Agnes Jurati puts her research skills to work in the hope of turning things around.
Relationships: Agnes Jurati & La Sirena's Emergency Holograms, Agnes Jurati/Cristóbal Rios
Comments: 21
Kudos: 13





	brush off the clouds and cheer up (put on a happy face)

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when I mash all the feels about Agnes and the holograms with Agnes and Cris, and it turns out there are a lot of them, and that emergency holograms, once introduced, refuse to budge. Contains attempts at wacky chaos to declarations of love in nought to five seconds.

She felt it as soon as she woke. It was like a thrum in the air, an edgy, off-putting sensation that made her skin creep. 

_Bad day coming_ , Agnes thought, yanking on the zipper of her jumpsuit so hard that it jabbed her chin. 

It was all Cris’s fault. Last night he’d gotten out of bed at least ten times to check on some navigational issue that apparently needed his personal obsessing over, and when 02:00 hours rolled around and with the door skimming open and shut yet again, Agnes had left without a word, padding across the deck wrapped in a blanket to her own quarters, to a bed she hadn’t slept in properly in weeks. She’d tried her best to ignore the argument that was playing out on the bridge in some sort of infinite loop. Even Enoch wore a sombre expression on his normally sunny face. Maybe that was what disturbed her the most.

All moods were infectious, but Cris’s were particularly so, especially the dark ones and especially when it came to Raffi. There was a level of personal snark the pair of them were able to stoop to which Agnes was quietly fascinated with, but on the whole it made the rest of the crew either recoil or watch in slight embarrassment, or even, in some cases, try to join in. Elnor, entirely innocent of scars and sarcasm, held on until the game of in-butting became akin to standing between two alleycats, and he retreated to his room. Soji lost herself in the the ship’s computer and Picard grizzled off to the holosuite. Only Seven was unaffected, though Agnes saw how she kept an eye pinned on Rios when he bore scathing verbal holes into the bulkhead, and when Raffi lay into him just as venomously in return.

It was a bad night following a bad day, and with all this weird energy building it needed to break soon or they would all implode. Messily. 

At least that would give them something to do, she supposed. A good, cathartic clean, whisking all the angst away.

Thoughts like these were oddly soothing. As she sat and sipped at a mug of tea, Agnes imagined the authorities beaming into the French countryside to inform Laris and Zhaban that the speed freighter known as La Sirena had blipped out of existence because of a system overload of... well, they were’t entirely sure, but it appeared to be catastrophic moodiness. It was an entirely new situation for the Federation; a Vulcan forensic expert had been brought in and an investigation was ongoing. _Nous sommes vraiment désolés, madame et monsieur, please take this scarred lump of chose importante, we believe it is the retired Admiral Picard’s commbadge._ The strange souvenirs of a ship and crew, left floating in the mire... 

She toyed with the idea of repeating this all to Soji, the only other individual in the mess – maybe even acting it out with a bad accent – but decided against it. She’d always had a leaning towards bleak humour but the hunched angle of the young synth’s shoulders warned Agnes that she probably wasn’t going to get the sort of reaction she was going for. She’d likely end up fused bodily with the replicator. Justice for the meddling doctor, another quandary for her imaginary Vulcan expert who specialised in unexplainable deaths. 

This daydream was getting complicated; she should really draw up a character profile for when she was extra bored and needed to flex her writing.

“For crying out loud! Save me from control freaks, please, get me off this existential tin can while I’m still sober...”

Raffi’s voice floated down the stairs, so dripping in exasperation it seemed to proceed her tired body. She landed on heavy feet and rubbed her forehead, then caught sight of Agnes. “Huh. You look like you barely slept as well.” At the look on Agnes’s face Raffi snorted, aiming a quick glare upstairs to the bridge. “Well, good luck with that, honey. He’s all yours to unravel. I’m out.” And she walked to get some food, muttering under her breath.

Agnes sat for a while, collecting her thoughts. She’d slept okay, really, in the end, but she had a feeling finessing that point wasn’t what Raffi had come down here for. It was just the waking up and the altogether funny mood the entire ship seemed to be under that was keeping her quiet. 

She took her empty mug to the reclaimer and grabbed a fresh one from the little collection that was housed on the bench. Cris tended to leave them lying around, so Agnes was forever corralling mugs festering an inch of cold liquid back to their home to be cleaned. (Every time the EHH caught her doing this he would tut and explain that guests did not have to keep house; Agnes towed to his fussy act exactly once, and then set about politely ignoring him – as much as it was possible to ignore a condescending tower of light.) She found drone-like tasks calming, they reminded her of the little domesticities she’d left behind, of her apartment in Okinawa and the tiny corner she called an office at Daystrom, where her project and glaringly empty floor space had been left gathering dust. Ironic now that when the ban on her research had been lifted she’d instead chosen life on an equally tiny ship in the everything out there. In the vast quantities of stuff, as she called it, once.

On the bridge Cris was slumped at a tired angle, legs jutted out and arms folded. When she came round to hover she saw that his eyes were closed, but a twitch of his beard gave away the fact that she’d been spotted. 

“Good morning.”

He looked up and took the mug she held out. “Morning,” he said gruffly. His voice sounded hoarse. She leaned against the back of the chair and he tipped his head and let her kiss him, but he made no movement otherwise. It was obvious that he was exhausted.

Agnes gestured to the lower floor. “So, Raffi--” she began, and Cris sighed.

“Yeah, I know. I’ll beg her good graces... later. Maybe. Once I’m sure she’s not going to phaser me in the kneecaps.”

“Nah, I think she’s just gone to deflate your stash of footballs.”

He grumped a half-smile. “Oh, well that’s okay, then.”

The stars blinked outside. Agnes sat at the tactical station and stared past them until they blended into her periphery. “Did you get any sleep?” she asked. 

“No.” She didn’t look around but could hear the apology after the word, the _I kind of wish you’d stayed, but I’m a stubborn idiot who can’t see sense when it’s in front of me._

Or, something like that. She liked supplying internal monologues as much as she liked teasing him. 

“Well, I did,” she said. “I had vivid dreams of a blue-tinged beach and a giant crab who was digging into the sand and screaming the whole time.”

“Sounds like the night I just had.”

“Did you really yell at Enoch?”

“I yell at all my holograms, Agnes. They’re me, remember? Who doesn’t take vast pleasure in kicking themselves to the ground?”

“But his poor face...” She turned back and propped her chin in her hand. “That’s going too far, even for you.”

Cris blinked, pondering her for a moment. “Sometimes I really can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.”

She felt a jab of irritation at this, and opened her mouth to hike her defensive skills into play when Seven appeared out of nowhere. Large eyes stared down at Agnes until she slipped out of the seat, feeling like she’d been sprung without a license behind the wheel. A string of beeps sounded behind her as the xB tapped into the computer with sure fingers, and she stopped at Cris’s shoulder, holding a hand out to take the mug which he’d managed to drain in record time. 

“See you later then,” she said softly, when he didn’t look at her.

–

Despite La Sirena being so compact in size it was surprisingly easy to be alone for a decent stretch of time, especially if you were on a particular mission to be all things silence and calm. Agnes wasn’t that, not exactly, but the white lights of the med-lab offered precious little zen as she poked around with sequencing modules, deleting and reinstating mess after mess of coding and all in all achieving a great sum of zero. The EMH blinked into existence a few times when she accidentally-on-purpose tapped into his master trigger, but when it became apparent all she was after was conversation and there was nothing of a medical dilemma to nanny over he pressed his lips together and became as impenetrable as the grump of a real thing she’d left stewing on the bridge. 

Typical, she thought, glaring as he shimmered away in a hologrammatic huff. 

She lost track of how many separate arguments she caught herself overhearing throughout the day. There was Cris and Raffi (“Thin ice, babe, like planetoid rings of ice thin.” “Yeah? Mention the Bajor job again, Raf, and I’ll punch a sweet La Sirena-shaped hole through that ice.”). There was Cris and Soji (“I know you’re smarter than all of us, but can you slow down to human speed for one second and just _listen_...”). There was Raffi and Picard and their own particular Romulan shadow and all the delights of that shared history; and Picard and Elnor, which seemed to be centred around the whole binding of oneself to a cause and did that grand purpose _really_ need to include interrupting the Admiral’s sleep? Just as one aggravation seemed to be dying something would be said to immediately spark the next. They were all about nothing, and all about everything to do with being together and not quite yet having worked out the kinks of crew and schedule and task and mission. She gave up counting the small clashes involving various holograms because that was putting Cris’s tally at an unfair high, and it wasn’t like she was keeping tabs on any of this, not at all, because if turning this into a game was the only thing she could do to quell the murmuring anxiety it gave her, then they were in even worse trouble than she’d realised...

Agnes was a problem solver. She had to do something. Or, more to the point, she had to start with someone.

So when ship’s night clicked around she walked to the bridge without a word. There, ignoring the verbal game of Parrises squares that Cris and Raffi had started up yet again, she gently but firmly dragged him from the hunched position he’d become moulded into in the captain’s chair and guided him past the ship’s rear and down the short T-junction and into her quarters. Raffi’s biting comment tail-ending their argument about, well, something, at this point Agnes didn’t really fucking care, faded into the distance as she let the door close.

He stood in the middle of the room and stared at her. “Um, hello?”

“Hi.” She tipped her head to one side. “What’s going on?”

“Well, I was thinking about getting some food, but if you’d rather...” His eyes flickered to the closed door.

“No, Cris, what’s going on with you? All I’m hearing out there is you picking fights with people. Yesterday, last night, today...” When he raised his eyebrows she sighed. “And this doesn’t count. You know what I mean.”

It looked like he would try and counter her but he sat on the end of the bed instead, hands resting on his thighs, tensing as if he wanted to grip onto something. A few seconds and then he fell back with a deep exhale.

She crawled over by the pillows. One of his hands lay above his head and Agnes took it. 

“Talk to me, ‘kay?” she said, softer now.

He looked up at her, an expression she couldn’t name on his upside-down face. 

“I thought the whole point was that you were sick of hearing my voice.”

Agnes squeezed his fingers. They might have fallen together like a sudden rush of a comet hitting out of nowhere and glancing her off course, but she was still cataloguing those paths and marvelling in how at peace it made her, just being with him. They balanced each other out in a way she found hard to describe; it was what it was, plain and unremarkable, shocking in its comfort. They were both through it all and tired, only too happy to skip past the first flush and grab onto everything that followed. She liked it equally when they talked just as when they didn’t talk at all. 

(And okay, sometimes the last was the thing she liked the most, and would save quietly to herself, to linger over in dull moments when everyone was on the bridge and things were humming along, and she felt herself quite distinctly in her own skin and... just aware.

There was nothing wrong with that. Her eyes were open to her own desires. She even stared at them sometimes, unblinking, like it was a challenge she had made to herself to not feel shame at any of this. For being here, still, in her own personal parole.)

She looked at the rise and fall of his chest as he lay there, then slipped one knee over him and stretched her arms above his head. She kissed him once, her body held still. He hesitated briefly before returning the question on her lips. His free hand wound in between her legs.

There had been a proper reason for her bringing him here, she thought, back in the aeons of time...

“Okay, I am genuinely famished now,” Cris said to the ceiling, a shortish time later, when she’d taken her fill of whatever that was and the sheets smelled like good but mildly guilty sex. She pondered things as the happy mess of chemicals ebbed through her. Her good intentions had gone bumping down a side road already. It would be disappointing if it wasn’t so predictable. “Uh, what were we not talking about again?”

Agnes rose with a sigh and began untangling herself from the bedding. She’d managed to somehow half shed every piece of clothing, which was an impressive feat considering most of those layers were beneath a one-piece jumpsuit. “Your eternal bad mood,” she supplied.

“Oh, right.”

She glanced over at him. “I mean it, though. I didn’t just haul you in here for... well, that, which was very nice by the way--”

“You’re welcome.”

“--as are you...” said Agnes, and he smiled slightly. “I mean it, though. Did something happen?” 

Cris sat up, pulling his sweater back on. There was a muffled grumbling from inside and she scooted back to twist the neck into place. His hair was pointing in all directions. “That’s a good look, Captain,” she murmured. 

He rolled his eyes and took a breath. Agnes waited. 

“You know I was an XO,” Cris began. 

Immediately a lump rose in her throat. She sat cross legged and ducked forward. “Wait, you don’t have to--”

“It’s okay, it’s not that,” he said quickly. “I’m talking about before. The job. I was second in command, responsible for the crew. And I was good. I anticipated everything. Everyone came to me, even the scared introverts who buried themselves in a screen all day would pop their head in my office, just to say hi. I wanted them to feel okay about unloading it all, their worries, every dumb thing that was a blocker in their heads to working through this problem or handling that person or that scary conversation. The stuff the captain cares about but truly does not have time for. And mine, he – he had enough on his plate. And he loved those kids. 

“But Starfleet command is the thing we all circled around... and Starfleet captains are there to move the big pieces so they don’t run into each other, and to do that they need a proper working engine, all the people and their faults, ironed out and locked into place. That’s where I landed. I smoothed over the cracks, I looked after people. People were my job, Agnes.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “And I stopped being good at it.”

“Hey, there’s a reason for that,” she said gently.

Cris shrugged. “Sure. It doesn’t excuse it, though. I don’t want to be that person again, but I kind of want to get some of the good stuff back. I want to be better at, uh. This.”

Agnes looked at him. “This?”

He waved vaguely at the room and the door. “I mean, this whole... I don’t know.” She caught the quick smile as he touched the back of his fingers to hers. “I was bullshitting around on my own for years, and I thought I’d finally gotten free of everything, but then you all came along. And suddenly Soji’s sitting there in my tactical station picking up stuff faster than I can teach it, or the damn kid’s spouting the bleeding obvious for the fiftieth time in an hour, and they’re both looking at me like I’m the answer to everything... and I want to go lock myself into the holomatrix because I cannot fucking _breathe_.” A pained expression crossed his face, shifting into embarrassment. “Is that just a mountainous cliche?”

Agnes nodded. “Oh, in every way possible.”

She gave him a moment when it looked like he wanted to add something, and when he didn’t she kissed him one last time, her hand pressed into his dark hair. They dressed in silence. 

Everyone was gathered in the mess, having already started on dinner. Seven, of all people, was in the middle of a story which at first hearing seemed to be about Harry Kim getting stuck in a Jefferies tube, but was really about the technical aspects of service crawlways particular to the Intrepid-class than anything of human interest. The others listened in slightly bored but dutiful silence. Agnes sat next to Soji and smiled with encouragement as Seven detailed the finer aspects of dealing with micro variations of temperature control within a confined space. Crew morale was not one of her strengths. But she was trying.

And it gave Agnes a kernel of an idea. 

–

“Is this an extraordinary meeting of the La Sirena Hologram Society? I thought we weren’t scheduled for another fortnight. Why are _you_ here, lassie?”

Agnes crossed her arms and tried not to sigh. 

“Because I called this meeting,” she said to Ian. “Look around you. These are my quarters we’re all sardined into.” 

“Ah, fair point. It is a wee bit cramped.”

This absolutely was not a joke, but Enoch chuckled anyway. 

“Wait,” added Agnes, catching up. “You guys have meetings? What do you talk about?”

Five sets of dark eyes stared at her. Well, technically four – Emmet, leaning against the far wall with arms crossed and feet square, had his firmly shut. Agnes glared at him until he let out a deep sigh and stood up a little straighter. He then winked at her. That was not at all disconcerting. 

Enoch and Emil were on opposite ends of the bed. Enoch was perched upright with a smile, patient and waiting, while the doctor sat with his weight tipped back on one arm, watching her with a thin veil of suspicion. Behind Agnes, Ian had settled at the tiny desk that was bolted to the wall and was already shuffling through a bag of tools. 

The EHH stood quietly by her shoulder. 

“I see somebody has jumped into things without a proper agenda,” he said, not bothering to glance into his folio. “Unsurprisingly, we appear to have drifted off track already, and I don’t even know what that track is. Why are we here, Dr Jurati?”

Agnes raised an eyebrow; once he might have adopted an attitude and carried on without pause, but now he was clearly waiting for her explanation, free of judgement. They were adapting.

Something decidedly nut and or bolt shaped cluttered to the floor and came to a rolling stop against Enoch’s shoe. “Whoopsie!” grunted Ian, scooting over to pick it up.

Maybe strike that last bit, she thought. 

“Look,” she said, “I gathered you all here because I need some intel, and while my secret spy skills are infinitely better than when I was a land-locked scientist, they’re still not great and if I tried this on my own the game would be up in five minutes. So. I’m asking for your help.”

This was the plan. First, assign one hologram to one crew member. Second, through a series of extremely innocent and double-edged questions, find out one specific thing which was guaranteed to make said individual happy. Third, combine all that knowledge into... well, she hadn’t quite gotten to that bit yet. But the steps in between would at least make her feel a whole lot better than sitting around doing nothing. 

Cris, admittedly, was another matter, a long game she needed to work on, but it fed into this one. More or less.

Emil sighed. “I’m a doctor, not a genie in a bottle,” he said, tipping upright and onto to his feet. “This is altogether simplistic and naive, and what’s more, a waste of time.”

Agnes held a hand out. Of all of them he was most like Cris in his tendency to adopt a stone-like countenance and retreat into sarcasm. But he was just as quick to listen, and she looked at him now and said, “Just hear me out. All of you. If it fails, it fails, and that’s okay, we’ll all go on. I just think it’s worth a try.” She smiled brightly. “And if the end result is fun with an exclamation mark – that’s fun! – well, which of you is enough of a grouch to deny that? Apart from, um... you, you and you,” she added quickly, pointing to Emmet, Emil, and Steward. 

Okay, she was kind of unravelling here. Time to wind them in with charm. That was how it usually worked with Cris. Sometimes.

The EMH put his hands into his coat pockets. He looked down at Agnes, sizing her up with a quiet efficiency, then he nodded. “Fine. Let me observe the admiral. I suppose some additional questioning won’t sound amiss if I seed it within a physical exam.”

Enoch stuck one hand into the air. He was practically vibrating with excitement. “Oh, Soji, please. Assign me to Soji. She’s a sweetheart.”

Mr Hospitality’s eyebrows shot somewhere towards the ceiling. “She’s also a deadly killing machine who is more intelligent that all of us combined, and could quite easily burrow into your coding and render you permanently mute if she were to tire of your endless chirping.”

There was an immediate uproar at this. Even Emmet straightened to his full height, shooting a stormy glare across the room. The EHH looked around, surprised. 

“That’s an outdated notion there,” spoke up Ian, shaking his head sadly. “Poor thing’s been to hell and back. Have a heart, Steward.”

“Right, then! Have it your way. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He glanced at Agnes and tapped a few times on his screen. “Then I shall take Elnor. I can shift into soft-mode if the boy’s heckles get up and I’m too slow in choosing to live, or whatever that damned passphrase of his is.”

Ian cleared his throat and held a hand up. “Leave me to Raffaela. That’ll take, she knows me well enough.”

A pause as they all looked to the shadow in the corner. The shadow sighed.

_“Observaré a la mujer enojada.”_

Agnes smiled. “Thank you, Emmet. Please don’t call Seven that to her face, though, unless you want the wrath of Raffi upon you.” 

“Is nobody going to mention the _proboscidea_ in the room?” said Steward. “Hum, how shall I describe them. A six foot conduit for all the existential angst in the cosmos, who seems unaware of the function of a hairbrush? A certain someone who holds a personal grudge at me for daring to source good pisco because he prefers to drown himself in some dredge he won off a Tellarite in a card game?” He put a hand to his chin. “By shocking coincidence has this same handsome face?” 

“Oh, you just leave that one to me,” said Agnes. 

He ducked his head at her. “Indeed we do,” he murmured, not missing a beat, and with that he promptly disappeared.

Agnes, her face suddenly quite warm, blinked into the space he had exited as the rest of the holograms looked pointedly at their shoes. There were times when she really did not want to be reminded that, at the basest level, they were all Cristobal Rios, and the extent to which they learned and shared a small but meaningful aspect of his psychological makeup was an actual part of them, real and quantifiable. Her mere presence on this ship was probably funnelling teraflops of data into their programming. Let alone the rest.

And if she thought too long on _that_ she would never be able to look any of them in the eye again.

She clapped her hands together. “Right, are we all good? We’ll reconvene in... forty eight hours? Is that long enough? I don’t know, I’m kinda working this on the fly here. Okay, well, meeting over I suppose. Um. Go team!” 

Four more silvery bursts in the air, then Agnes was alone. She collapsed onto the bed, groaning, and buried her face into the pillows. 

–

The next day and a bit saw the crew keep to themselves. She felt safe in the knowledge that most of the holograms would do well enough with the tasks she’d given them, and while she was fairly bursting with curiosity as to what ‘light conversation’ translated to in Emmet’s world, she knew it was important for her foot soldiers to do their work solo. 

There were, of course, deeper rooted problems that she was circling very widely and very purposely around, including her own, and whatever this distraction ended up morphing into wasn’t going touch that. Cris’s words about wanting to get the good stuff back wasn’t a plea for Agnes to snap her fingers and make it happen, because (as everyone knew) love could do that, it was just that strong. 

No, that was a dream in a blissful fog that had nothing to do with the sharp corners that life let them jab their bodies into. It was and would only ever be something he had to do himself. 

The only part she could play here was her own.

–

Agnes stared down at the PADD. She stared at it for a long moment before speaking. 

“So, it turns out that happiness is an impractical myth. Well, hurrah. I guess we’ll all die of grey gloom in the detritus of nothing.” 

The EMH tossed a wave of hair from his eyes, pondered her as he rocked slightly on his feet, and said, not unkindly, “Well, we did warn you.”

Steward raised a hand. “In point of fact, I believe those were _my_ words...”

“No, no, I expressed my concern,” countered Emil, spinning ninety degrees first to speak, then immediately back again, to gesture at Agnes. “I want that noted on the record, please, and what’s more--”

Agnes raised her voice. “Enough! Can we stop arguing over who was the Cassandra here, and focus on what we can salvage from... this.”

Impractical was an understatement. Confusing was a more accurate descriptor. 

It was fair to say there’d also been some crying, too.

Before calling them together she had spent an hour reading through their submissions. It was, to put it mildly, a mixed bag. 

First up was Ian’s, which had set the tone with foreboding dread. 

_Raffi Musiker believes herself to be doomed. She stands like a lightening rod on that fair hill and has her feet planted so firmly on the ground that she doesn’t see how it shifts beneath her. I don’t dare try to fill in the gaps. That’s none of my business. If she were a broken circuit I’d set her down in the diagnostics and fix her best I could, but she’s like Cristobal, too easy to slip in that gloom. Why do these people love hiding so much? They lash out and lash in, and catching them with a smile’s near impossible..._

_It’s confusing to us holograms. Dr Jurati, when you read this, please know that we feel that. Feel as in have a blight on our programming, a subroutine locked in a loop because it has no answer. Your realness confuses us. You are contradictions all of you, your living wires crossed and tangled._

_You set us off task._

_You wanted to find out what makes this woman happy? I don’t know if I can answer that, but I do know this: it’s not being alone. It’s not gazing into a dead commlink where a lad grown up has long signed off and sworn his Ma away. It’s not hating an absence of someone._

Something twisted in her stomach. What terrible box had she opened here? 

The EEH’s concluding paragraph was, thankfully, a touch more pragmatic. _I’m a practical program. I work and I fix and I move onto the next torn thing. Raffaela is practical, too. She has little time for nonsense (or, I suppose, for the irony that a lot of it she makes well on her own). She helps others, has bucket loads of empathy. In fact, she’s close to overflowing with it._

_I also suspect she’s crushing at warp speed on our resident ex-Borg. Best of luck to you, Doctor!_

Statement of the bleeding obvious number one, Agnes thought. She moved on to the next entry, quickly. 

It was a poem.

“Oh, Enoch,” she said.

_Among the stars, born years ago three  
lived two girls, brought to be, told to be  
and told to think; and think they did, thinking their  
world as peculiar, private,  
finite and rare.  
They didn’t know who they were  
or why they were there.  
Then one was gone, then the other ran, her  
ignorance a blazing light. It left her alone  
again, to fight, and when she escaped,  
was told to come! follow!  
Others here will keep her safe.  
It hurt to trust, and so she stopped.  
She couldn’t ask because the rot  
was lurking,  
the lie was there, her past a mistake  
she vowed in her heart to never again make..._

Agnes scanned the rest of the page. What had Enoch been reading to spark this? It sounded like some Andorian grand wordsmith crossed with Winnie the Pooh. Bless his sweet heart. Her eyes drifted to the last two lines. 

_and cries in her sleep this is me, this is me!  
who am I? the world commands. My name is Soji._

The others were going to have to show some pretty creative muscle to top that. Not that it exactly answered the brief Agnes had set out, in fact it had taken pretty much a quadrant-sized detour, but never mind. 

Next came the EHH.

 _I began by journey into the world of the Qowat Milat by first of all redirecting my misgivings into a better channel,_ wrote Steward. _After all, if I was to succeed in learning this young man’s fundamental drivers then putting aside my prejudices was an important first step. I instigated proceedings by asking if I might join in his morning rituals. While suspicious of my motivations, he agreed. After a meditation session during which very little was said aside from several enquiries on the boy’s part as to how I was going to appreciate the purposeful discomfort if I was merely hovering point two millimetres above the floor, we moved on to the Sheathing of the Sword. This involved intricate lacing of leather straps in a basic lattice shape around the torso, and I was given the honour of tying the final knots. What a thrill!_

On it went, details of fabrics, movement and manners, in increasingly complex and florid detail. The EHH appeared to have undertaken a full apprenticeship of the way of Romulan Warrior Nuns in the span of a few hours and had relished every moment. Agnes was impressed, if unsurprised. She skipped to the end. 

_I now have an extensive databank on Elnor’s history and can make accurate conclusions on what it is he is seeking in this universe, should the question be asked. But I suspect all the dear boy wants is a cat._

Another expansive insight, she thought with a sigh. 

Emmet’s entry consisted of a single line.

 _Seven of Nine, the ex Borg Fenris Ranger from the Delta Quadrant,_ it read: _Ella quiere salvar..._ She wants to save the world.

Check and check. Agnes lay back, throwing the PADD to one side. After exactly one minute of not at all calm breathing she turned onto her stomach and picked it up again. She was only delaying the inevitable. 

The last entry was by Emil, and went for eight densely formatted page-sets, with detailed footnotes, graphs, and suggestions for further reading. Thankfully he had also provided an executive summary, which she mulled over slowly, her chin propped up on one hand:

_Observations made of the subject JP (Jean-Luc Picard, admiral (retired), mind transfer of a human aged in his ninth decade now imbedded in a synthetic form). Taken during a routine checkup with La Sirena’s Emergency Medical Hologram. Log 21b, August 19, 15:02-15:30, submitted to Dr Agnes P. Jurati, for the purposes of data gathering and I’m assuming some sort of frivolous round of gift giving or a party of some sort*. But what would I know, I’m only an extensively programmed tool designed by the most thorough medical minds in the Federation._

_Initial findings are as follows:_

____

_
  1. The subject does not like routine checkups.
_ _
  2. The subject does not like answering light-hearted questions about his ideal day of fun and relaxation while undertaking said routine checkups.
_ _
  3. This EMH sympathises deeply with point 2.
_ 


_Fortunately, I have extensive experience in dealing with reluctant patients, and the fact that this one was polite and calm despite his reservations, and wasn’t threatening to switch my audio and visual receptors off every three seconds, was an advantage I felt could and must be grasped. After some gentle probing, I was able to reach the following conclusions:_

____

_
  1. The subject yearns for a home.
_ _
  2. That home is not necessarily in a French vineyard.
_ _
  3. More data is required.
_ 


_The following pages seek to expand the above notes in greater detail._

_Summary ends._

_*This writer makes no judgement on the overall purpose of this undertaking, but wishes to make it known that he believes this to be an elaborate waste of hologrammatic resources, and if the instigator of this mission really wanted to put a smile on her crewmates’ faces she would do well in simply putting this and my brothers’ findings into the public domain. They would see the extent to which she cares is a real and complicated thing, bound by human nature and driven, ultimately and infuriatingly, by love. - EMH_

That was where Agnes started to cry. If she’d had the courage to summon him into the room then, to brave an immediate reaction, she might have embarrassed herself by wrapping her arms around him. Around all of them, really. And possibly never letting go.

She didn’t, though. She instead took a minute or three to pull herself together, then quietly logged the meeting into the holo interface and sat very still, hands in her lap, waiting for them to blink one by one into the room.

Now as they bickered amongst themselves, she looked down at the PADD again and wondered what all this was really about. She felt a presence at her shoulder. It was Ian.

“I suppose you want to make an official complaint, too,” she said.

“Not in the slightest. But look here. I’m an engineer, and one thing I have a great passion for – and I suspect you share a slice of it, too – is finding practical solutions for seemingly impossible problems.”

Agnes shrugged, but couldn’t help smiling back. “I’d like to think so.”

“Aye, I know so. So too does the captain. He’s just not all that great at communicatin’ trivial things like, oh, let’s hazard a guess, his _feelings_. You’re doing a stellar job. They all know it. He knows it. And don’t bite my head off, please, but I’ll also go far as to say he loves ye for it. Whatever all this faff amounts to, you should just go out there and share it. Don’t wallow here in the quiet playing referee to our poor nattering. You’ll be stuck here forever.”

Bring on round two of the tears. “Oh, come now,” said Ian hurriedly, “it’s no use crying. Come now...”

This was terrible. This was absolutely not where she had intended this to go. Suddenly all five of them were gathered around her, alarmed murmurs and hands hovering, ready to offer comfort if she asked for it. In the centre of it all, Agnes held herself still. She didn’t dare look at any of them. 

It was Emmet who broke the silence, though not with words. He grunted slightly and indicated with a jerk of his head that he was departing, and if the others knew what was good for them, they should, too. 

Agnes emerged from her sleeve and touched his arm briefly, at the tattoos Cris might have taken had he truly lifted that anchor and allowed himself to slip away. She smiled at his sad eyes, and said, “Thank you, Emmet, for helping. You were wonderful, you all were. I’m sorry it was such a waste of time.”

He shook his head, meaning no. No it wasn’t, not for her. 

He was right, of course.

–

After that interlude in which she learned exactly nothing she hadn’t already known about the others but kind of a lot about herself, and more to the point, why research skills based on emotions were about as productive as corralling the stars, Agnes spent a half day programming the holosuite. 

Raffi, hands on her hips, asked, no demanded, what the hell Agnes was doing. She shrugged.

Picard politely but brusquely enquired when and if he would be getting his study back. She nodded vaguely and said soon.

Cris, busy on his way to other things, stood and watched for a moment before he drew a hand over her hair gently and kissed her forehead. He didn’t bother to ask.

She buried her head in code. Then she sent out invitations.

–

“What is this, Doctor?” asked Picard, as they stood by the holosuite door. The ship’s computer had ticked over to 20:00 hours, the exact time Agnes had marked last minute on their calendars. “I was genuinely hoping for an early night, but I appear to have been issued a summons.”

Elnor recited the words she’d sent out. _“To friends and crew, old and new. Come inside all, this surprise is for you.”_ He frowned. “Is the surprise fun or frightening? I need to know beforehand, to prepare the correct reaction.”

“Listen, honey, not to pour water on whatever this is, but I have a shitton of stuff to be doing,” said Raffi. “And you’ve gotta get _way_ down to the dregs of that list before ‘holosuite fun ‘n’ games’ appears, believe me.”

The others, too, looked skeptical. “How does it work?” asked Seven. 

Agnes jumped forward. “Yes! Oh, this is the best part. You see, I wanted everyone to do this at once, not have to wait all in a line like a ride or something. This is all personalised to each of you. It’s running off your individual imprints, so you all see things differently, but at the same time. Crazy, right? God, it took me ages to figure out how to move things in parallel, though, you seriously have no idea, I think I was a puddle on the ground at one point. Emil was actually concerned for maybe a hot minute, until I reminded him this was partly his doing, and--”

She felt hands on her shoulders. Cris bent down so his eyes were level with hers. “Agnes. Take a breath, please?” 

Agnes huffed and tried again. “Just... go in.”

She punched in the start sequence. The door slid open. 

Cris stood back as the others filed through, and when she looked over he was side-eyeing her with barely hidden amusement.

Agnes ignored it. “What, you want me to repeat that all again in captain code?” She pulled at his hand instead. “Come on, disaster awaits.” 

–

It was going to be perfect. 

Never mind that she’d put everybody’s real problems aside and had opted for fuzzy warm feelings over anything remotely resembling a therapeutic poke into the dark. That was never going to work, solving years of underlying issues in a day. No, this she could do. This, she was good at. She could patch and mend as well as any of them, knowing with absolute certainly that the arguments would continue as they always had. That was life, not escapism.

For Picard, it meant a cozy murder mystery, a quiet village, dry stone walls, arsenic in the custard creams; with the final _denouement_ finessed to the last shocked breath as the bell struck midnight. Easy, done.

For Soji and Elnor (who really weren’t children but for the sake of light entertainment fell into that category because Agnes was feeling her age more than a bit at this point, and was kind of lost when it came to the toils of young people) she’d programmed every cute and fluffy creature she could pack into a small holosuite. La Sirena’s own petting zoo. Who could dislike that? The serotonin practically made itself. 

She’d been slightly presumptuous when it came to the whole Raffi and Seven thing, twisting her brain for a while in trying to be romantically creative before giving in somewhat and opting for a high stakes game of poker, upping the difficulty to a magnitude which, with any luck, would leave them in a excellently competitive mood. And who knows what that might lead to. Raffi could thank her later, Agnes decided, more than a little smugly. 

(Her subtle attempts at rendering Seven’s whole saving the world manifesto into a card game was probably going to be lost in the translation of it all, but Agnes had maybe ten working braincells left at this point and only a few hours’ recreation time to play with. She wasn’t superwoman. That was what personal interpretation was for. And hopefully, the aftermath, too. Again with the presumptions.)

When it came to Cris, though, that was there things had fallen slightly apart. There were too many feelings here to be impartial and practical. Her head had spun in a slightly worrying loop until she made herself recall Ian’s words. He was going to register little of the inside of this holosuite, and everything in the hours before and after. 

So for her captain, missing and wanting something he couldn’t name, she’d installed a low lit club and a vast window looking out at Earth, and she’d tagged her own ID into the shared indent, so they could pretend to dance to Holiday and Fitzgerald and Vaughan, and they could hold each other in the light of home, and not say a word.

He would love it. That was the easy part. They all would.

She really should have stuck to baking a cake.

–

“You were saying something about disaster, _cariño?”_

Agnes stared, open mouthed, at the scene before her.

Smoke billowed in the air. The room was split in two, one half a deserted bar and stage, the other a room decorated tweely with a table set for afternoon tea. In the middle a simmering flurry pierced the air where the two halves met, and crossing freely between them were dozens of figures, shouting angrily. Chairs were toppled and small animals scurried around the mess, bleating and squeaking.

All her work, all her personalised dedications to happiness and harmony, had mangled into one giant, technicolour mess. 

And it was horrifying. 

Hercule Poirot, or at least a well-rendered holo version of the fictional detective, teetered towards her on unsteady legs. His arms were full of tribbles. His moustache was askew. Romulan brandy wafted thick as rocket fuel on his breath. “Madame, I – _hic!_ – pray your forgiveness, this was not – _hic!_ – meant to – _hic!_ – happen.”

One of the tribbles slipped out of his grasp and tumbled to the floor. Cris immediately jumped back. “Get those _fucking things away from me!”_

Something shot through the air, crashing into the wall and only just missing their heads. Agnes picked it up. It was a clarinet. One of the club musicians, tall and stylishly outfitted in a pinstripe suit, scooped it out of her hands. He tested the reed, puffed out an ear-piercing note, and gave her a wink. “This joint is trouble. Save yourself before it’s too late, doll.” 

He jogged away, only to be replaced by Raffi. Bunnycorn fur peppered her hair and she had a rip in her vest. Her voice was grim. 

“Better get moving, hon. The sleepy village crowd and the jazz club are about to bust into an all out brawl and our escape route’s their firing line. Seven and I have commandeered the pool table while we figure out how to break the program. C’mon.” And with that Raffi disappeared back into the fray. 

“Sounds like we have our orders, soldier.” Cris, booting a tribble deftly aside with one foot, pulled Agnes along. 

“Wait,” said Agnes, finding her voice at last, “wait, this is all wrong, I didn’t design this. Computer, end program Jurati Party One!”

Nothing happened. 

She scooted down as the floor rumbled from a distant boom. An oddly harmonic off note thrummed into the distance. It sounded like a church bell exploding. Agnes risked a look at one of the landscapes she’d happily rendered only hours ago. It _was_ a church bell exploding. She gaped at Cris helplessly as he slung an arm around her and laughed. “Jurati Party?” he repeated.

“Shut up,” she groaned. 

Picard, leaning calmly against the upended pool table, reached for what was left of the church committee’s afternoon tea. “Scone and jam, anyone?” he asked, voice raised above the noise. 

“Yes, thank you!” yelled Elnor. He was sitting cross-legged, a very fluffy lamb cradled in one arm and a sleeping dachshund puppy in the other. 

There was a clamour of sharp bleats as a group of baby Bolian goats scrambled across the bartop, their blue fur glowing. Bottles of liquor went crashing to the floor. Agnes winced, hunkering down again. “I don’t understand what’s happening! This was supposed to be fun and relaxing!”

The others emerged from the smoke. Soji immediately knelt by the lamb and cooed as it licked a blob of cream off her fingers. Seven and Raffi were all business. Everyone seemed totally prepared and completely unperturbed by the chaos. 

She realised Raffi was shouting in her ear – “Okay, we got through to the computer. Try again, Doc!” – and Agnes jumped into action.

“Computer–-” 

_“Warning. Holo matrix overload in thirty seconds. Recommend program termination. Warning. Holo matrix overload in twenty-five seconds. Recommend program termination. Warning. Holo matrix–”_

“–-end program!”

The disorienting echo of a suddenly stopped cacophony rang in her ears. They were alone in an empty space, four walls and a plain floor, grid lines all around them. The matrix hummed softly.

Agnes looked at the others as they sat on the floor, blinking. “Well,” she croaked. “Was that... fun?”

“I was hoping for a cat,” said Elnor. “I did not see a cat. But the rest was very entertaining. Can we turn it back on, please?”

Raffi grinned, reaching across Seven to tap Agnes on the arm. “Damn. I gotta get a sniff of what you’re on, Doc. That was crazy awesome.”

Seven nodded. “I agree. It was rather stimulating.”

Soji cupped her hands around her ears, opening and shutting her jaw. “I can _still_ hear that bell ringing,” she muttered.

A banging emerged from the outside the holosuite. There was a distant hum of voices and then the door jerked open, sending sparks everywhere. They watched as a pile of holograms fell into the room. 

“Great,” muttered Cris. “Here comes the rescue party.”

“Well, lassie, all congratulations to you. That’s some creative and truly devastating programming you’ve managed to install there. I’d say you’ve put her out of commission for at least a week,” said Ian, sounding altogether too happy for someone delivering bad news. 

Enoch shot to them like a magnet and circled them worriedly. “My word, we thought we’d lost you all!”

“No, we didn’t,” soothed Steward in a languid tone. “Catastrophic nonsense. It was merely a holo-program gone rogue and on a singular mission to destroy you all. Nothing to worry about in the slightest. You were only fortunate that the safety features were not similarly harangued.”

Picard’s face fell. “You mean my study’s gone?” he asked Ian, ignoring Emil who had knelt on the floor and was looked him over while the others picked themselves up.

The EEH scratched his beard. “Aye, it is. My commiserations, Admiral. You’ll have to find some other nest o’ calm until I can wrangle the jinks out.” He brightened. “I could possibly clear out one of the old storage lockers, make it up cozy for you. How’s that sound?”

With a grunt Picard took Elnor’s offered hand and clambered to his feet. He peered at Agnes. “I know you meant well, Doctor, I really do. But perhaps you should test these things out before herding us all into a battlefield.”

She looked after him helplessly. “It wasn’t meant to be a...” 

They trudged out one by one, past Emmet who stood sentry by the door, ticking off all hands saved on his fingers. _“¿Me perdí la diversión?”_ he grunted, raising an eyebrow.

Cris shook his head gravely, pausing at the threshold. “No. There were tribbles, Emmet. Lots of tribbles.”

 _“Pequeños bastardos.”_

Agnes sighed.

–

Never one to run from trouble, she immediately made a beeline for the stairs and the mad-lab. “Don’t worry, I’m going to figure this out, guys,” she said, as everyone ignored her.

Almost everyone.

“Can I talk to you?” Cris tapped at her arm. He glanced at Raffi and Seven, who had returned to the bridge, then back at Agnes. His eyes searched her out, his face unreadable.

She waited until the door to his quarters had closed before launching into her apology. “Ugh, again, I’m so sorry. Look at me, I’m a disaster, I know, but I honestly thought--”

He stepped towards her. “You’re a disaster?” he repeated. His hands fell to her face, and as he stared at her she felt all the pent up energy leave her in a rush. She bit out a sigh and leant against him, pressing her face against his neck. 

“Yes,” she said eventually, and laughed, feeling like it was either that or cry. “The worst, you have no idea.”

“No, I think I’m beginning to get a lot of ideas, real fast.”

She nearly melted at his hopelessness. She thumped his chest gently instead. Cris shook his head. “That was ridiculous, Agnes Jurati. Only you would try that and fail so spectacularly and still achieve exactly what you set out to do.”

“It’s a gift, I suppose,” she said.

She pulled at him then, and kissed him. She did it again. She was still twisted inside and wanting to explain, near to bursting with it, but the air was changed and the rest could wait. She walked him slowly to the bed. He dropped to his knees, undid the clasp of her pants. She lay back, closed her eyes and reached down, tethering her fingers into his hair. He wrapped his lips to her as the ship flew around them, until fast blinking light swirled at her eyelids and she was arching into the sheets, and in a flicker of rational thought she realised this was okay. They would all be okay. They could maybe live a little wildly after all. 

–

She rested in Cris’s arms. In the quiet she listened to the faint hum of ship’s night, picking out voices past the thick bulkhead, the low tone of Seven mixed with Soji’s. A tap of the air cyclers adjusting to the down temperature as their bodies cooled. 

“I wanted you to realise you don’t have to do this alone,” she said. “I know we’re hardly a proper crew and we don’t have ranks and this is absolutely not Starfleet, but if you’re the captain then that means you have something behind you, you have us. You aren’t the only one here, okay?” 

“I’m not making you my XO, Agnes,” he grunted. 

“Please, no! I’d be awful. You’d have a mutiny within fifteen minutes.” 

He looked at her blearily. “Or my CMO.” 

She rolled against him, smiling. “I think you have a pretty capable one already.” 

“Then what?” he asked. 

“Then don’t fight us,” she said. “Don’t close up and take it all. Let us be silly and make noise and sulk. Let us squander our little battles.”

“Wasn’t that kind of what started you on this in the first place?”

The tease was heavy in his voice. She prodded at his stomach and said, “Oh, absolutely. And look what happened. I destroyed Picard’s precious home away from home. I ruined everyone’s week, everyone’s month.” She sighed. “Good old Agnes, she never disappoints.”

By the way his gaze fell on her she knew that he disagreed. 

She closed her eyes and was feeling the tug of sleep pull her thoughts away when he spoke again. “This thing with the EHs, though. Were you ever going to do your little investigating number on me? Or were you just going to deputise Enoch?” asked Cris.

She considered this. “Why? What would you have told him?”

“To piss off, probably.”

“See, that’s why I didn’t.” Agnes paused. “But what if I asked now?”

He let out a long breath. “Let’s see. You practically blew up my holosuite on a mission to make us all happy. You’re lying next to me in a room I never used to let anyone into. I go to sleep with the taste of you... do I really need to answer that?”

Agnes shook her head. She pressed against him. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear it.”

“I can’t believe you actually wrangled those holograms into doing something useful.” Cris really couldn’t let it go. It almost sounded as if he was surprised at being surprised. “Even if it was a complete disaster. I love that you did that.” He curled one hand into her hair. “I love...”

She smiled as he trailed off. And that, she thought, leaning into the quiet. In the ups and downs, there was that.

–

_Postscript, log 21b: a note and a request._

_Doctor--_

_You left out one individual in this whole mission. I recall the glib explanation given to our Steward when he pointed this out. I know Captain Rios doesn’t ask or want for our concern. There are gaps in our recollection of his time before, it’s true, but it’s nobody’s place to try and fill those in or to make anything better. He doesn’t want better._

_You’re doing so well, Agnes dear. You’re doing much more than any of us thought you would._

_Look after him, please, where we try and where we can’t. Let him do the same for you. Treat it as you might a mess to laugh over, a mistake in a moment._

_Remember. You are real, too._

_Emil_


End file.
